[Beowulf] Building new cluster - estimate

[Ivan Oleynik]

Bill,

Thank you for your comments.


>> Yes, both opteron 2356 and Xeon E5440 are comparable in pricing (~ $700),
>> but it is 0.5 GHz difference!
>>
>
> Er, so, aren't you more concerned with performance than clockspeeds?  I've
> seen little if any correlation.
>

Yes, I care about performance, but our previous experience with running our
mpi codes on TACC computers (Ranger, Barcelona 2.0 GHz) and Lonestar (Xeon
5100 2.66GHz) is not in favor of AMD. They have recently upgraded Ranger to
2.3 GHz, I am going to run tests and report the results.



>
> Keep in mind that Intel hasn't changed their memory system much in quite a
> few
> generations.
>

But FSB was bumped up substantially (from 400 MHz in 2002  to 1600 MHz now).



>  I am going to run some tests, but our previous experience with 2.0GHz
>> Barcelona was not very encouraging.
>>
>
> What tests did you run?  8 threads on each?  Basically if you are cache
> friendly the intel systems win, if not the opteron systems win.  Over twice
> the memory bandwidth can be quite handy.  AMD still wins most 8 thread
> benchmarks (spec CPU and spec web among others) and many application tests
> that I've done.
>

These are the MPI jobs, 8 processes per 8 cores. I am not sure about the
setup, but I thought it is worth to disable multithreading. Correct me if I
am wrong.


Ivan
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